Category: Golden Age Mysteries

9

which for me is He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by August 31, 2018.

My copy is a Golden Age Mystery, one of the Green Penguin Crime and Mystery series paperbacks, published in 1953 (first published in 1946). It features Dr Gideon Fell.

Here’s the blurb from Goodreads:

At the edge of the woods by the river stands the tower. Once part of a chateau since burnt down, only the tower remains. The inside is but a shell with a stone staircase climbing spirally up the wall to a flat stone roof with a parapet.

One that parapet the body of Howard Brooke lay bleeding. The murderer, when Brooke’s back was turned, must have drawn the sword-cane from it sheath and run him through the body. And this must have occurred between ten minutes to four and five minutes past four, when the two children discovered him dying.

Yet the evidence showed conclusively that during this time not a living soul came near him.

I’m looking forward to reading He Who Whispers as I haven’t read any of Carr’s books before and I’m really pleased one of the crime fiction novels I listed came up in the Spin.

This was first published in 1946 by Collins Crime Club. This edition, published in association with the British Library, has an introduction by Martin Edwards, and it has a beautiful cover.

Description:

The Second World War is drawing to a close. Nicholas Vaughan, released from the army after an accident, takes refuge in Devon – renting a thatched cottage in the beautiful countryside at Mallory Fitzjohn. Vaughan sets to work farming the land, rearing geese and renovating the cottage. Hard work and rural peace seem to make this a happy bachelor life.

On a nearby farm lives the bored, flirtatious June St Cyres, an exile from London while her husband is a Japanese POW. June’s presence attracts fashionable visitors of dubious character, and threatens to spoil Vaughan’s prized seclusion.

When Little Thatch is destroyed in a blaze, all Vaughan’s work goes up in smoke – and Inspector Macdonald is drafted in to uncover a motive for murder.

E C R Lorac was a pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958) who was a prolific writer of crime fiction from the 1930s to the 1950s, and a member of the prestigious Detection Club. She also wrote under the name of Carol Carnac, but she seems to have been a forgotten author and I hadn’t heard of her until quite recently, when I read Bats in the Belfry.

Fire in the Thatch is set in rural Devon in 1944 and the atmosphere of life in the Devon countryside is highlighted by Lorac’s rich description of the landscape, the traditional ways of farming and the characters. It shows the clear distinctions between the social classes and the tensions between them and the conflicting moral values of the town and country folk. She conveys the sense that change is on the way as the war moves towards its conclusion. The war forms the background to the book – June’s husband is a prisoner of war in Burma, evacuees have been billeted in the countryside and rationing, in particular petrol rationing (which plays an important role in this book) is making life difficult.

The book begins in a leisurely way describing the isolated community of Mallory Fitzjohn and introducing the characters, Colonel St Cyres, his daughter Anne and daughter-in-law June living at Manor Thatch, and Norman Vaughan, a new tenant at Little Thatch, invalided out of the navy with damaged eyesight. Other main characters are Thomas Gressingham, a wealthy stockbroker and a friend of June’s, staying at Hinton Mallory, in the valley below Mallory Fitzjohn, and his friends Howard Brendon, a lawyer interested in buying property and Raymond (Rummy) Radcliffe, a ‘rotund’ speculator.

And then in chapter 5 we learn that Vaughan’s body was found in the burnt-out debris of Little Thatch and Chief Inspector Macdonald of New Scotland Yard has been asked to investigate the case. From that point on the book follows his comprehensive and detailed methods of trying to establish whether his death was accidental and if not what could be the motive for his murder, and if indeed the dead man was Vaughan or someone else. Why had Vaughan, a north country man decided to settle in Devon and who was the woman he had indicated to the St Cyres that he intended to marry?

All of Macdonald’s skills are needed to get to the bottom of this complex mystery which confused me right up until the end of the book. I preferred Bats in the Belfry, but Fire in the Thatch is still an enjoyable book. It’s just that Macdonald’s investigations seemed to drag on a bit too long, and I found it confusing as he described the details of how and when Vaughan had died. But I loved the setting and the characters.

I do hope the British Library will publish more of E C R Lorac’s books – there are plenty to choose from as she wrote forty-eight mysteries under her first pen name, and twenty-three under her second, producing two books a year from 1931 until her death in 1958.

This was first published in 1937 by Collins Crime Club. This edition has an introduction by Martin Edwards.

Description:

Bruce Attleton dazzled London’s literary scene with his first two novels – but his early promise did not bear fruit. His wife Sybilla is a glittering actress, unforgiving of Bruce’s failure, and the couple lead separate lives in their house at Regent’s Park.

When Bruce is called away on a sudden trip to Paris, he vanishes completely – until his suitcase and passport are found in a sinister artist’s studio, the Belfry, in a crumbling house in Notting Hill. Inspector Macdonald must uncover Bruce’s secrets, and find out the identity of his mysterious blackmailer.

This intricate mystery from a classic writer is set in a superbly evoked London of the 1930s.

E C R Lorac was a pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958) who was a prolific writer of crime fiction from the 1930s to the 1950s, and a member of the prestigious Detection Club. Little has been written about her life. By the time of her death she had produced more that seventy books but she seems to have been a forgotten author and I hadn’t heard of E C R Lorac until quite recently.

I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed Bats in the Belfry, which is set in London in the 1930s. There is the occasional anti-Semitic comment, offensive now but it seems to reflect the period in which Lorac was writing. However, it’s full of descriptive writing painting vivid pictures of the streets of London and in particular the spooky, Gothic tower in which a corpse is discovered, ‘headless and handless‘. For a while the identity of the murdered man is in doubt – is it that of Bruce Attleton who had unaccountably disappeared or that of the mysterious stranger, Debrette who it seems had been blackmailing Bruce?

Chief Inspector Macdonald of New Scotland Yard is called in to investigate Bruce’s disappearance. I liked Macdonald, a ‘long lean faced’ Scot. He’s a shrewd detective, not easily ruffled or fooled. The other characters are well defined, including Bruce’s wife Sybilla, both of whom are having affairs, and his friends, one of whom, Robert Grenville, is in love with his ward Elizabeth, a lively and resourceful young woman. The plot is complex, with enough twists and turns to keep me guessing until very nearly the end of the book.

I think this is one of the better Golden Age Mysteries that I have read, and I’m now looking forward to reading another of her books, Fire in the Thatch, set in Devon.

This is the first Inspector Appleby mystery by Michael Innes. What struck me most about Death at the President’s Lodging is that it is essentially a ‘locked room’ mystery. Dr Umpleby, the unpopular president of St Anthony’s College (a fictional college similar to an Oxford college) is found in his study, shot through the head.

The crime was at once intriguing and bizarre, efficient and theatrical. It was efficient because nobody knew who had committed it. And it was theatrical because of a macabre and necessary act of fantasy with which the criminal, it was quickly rumoured, had accompanied his deed. (page 1)

Inspector Appleby from Scotland Yard is in charge of the investigation, helped by Inspector Dodd from the local police force. They provide an interesting contrast, both in appearance, age and methods. Appleby is an intellectual, contemplative, preferring to study human nature rather than rely on the use of finger prints and material evidence. Dodd is reliant on routine and although untrained and unspecialised is shrewd and thorough. They know each other and make a good pair. This passage sums up their working relationship:

And now Dodd for all his fifteen stone and an uncommon tiredness (he had been working on the case since early morning), sprang up with decent cordiality to welcome his colleague. ‘The detective arrives,’ he said with a deep chuckle when greetings had been exchanged, ‘and the village policeman hands over the body with all the misunderstood clues to date.’ (page 5)

What follows is an extremely convoluted and complex investigation of the strange crime. Without the plan at the beginning of the book I would have been lost. The college is divided into different areas and each area is locked each evening, shutting it off from the outside world and shutting one part of the college off from the rest. Dodd describes it as a ‘submarine within a submarine’. The questions are how did the murderer get in and out, who had keys, and why was Umpleby murdered?

Appleby and Dodd interview the Fellows of the College, each of whom it seems at first could have had reason to murder Umpleby. Who is telling the truth? I couldn’t tell and there are innumerable clues to mystify both the police and the reader. Appleby watches and listens, recognising that he is not going to get a quick result in such a complicated case. Of course, in the end he works it all out. He gathers together the Fellows and calls on a number of them to give their statements of the facts as they know them. They each suspect a different person as the culprit, but Appleby gradually eliminates the suspects to reveal the murderer.

It was masterly. It’s also a book that you can’t read quickly. It requires concentration. There is little action, much description and a lot of analysis. I enjoyed it very much, but after reading it I felt my brain needed a little rest.

I also wrote about Michael Innes in my Crime Fiction Alphabet series of posts – I is for Innes.